ensure an easy delivery;[843] and in
various parts of France they think that if a girl dances round nine
fires she will be sure to marry within the year.[844] On the other hand,
in Lechrain people say that if a young man and woman, leaping over the
midsummer fire together, escape unsmirched, the young woman will not
become a mother within twelve months:[845] the flames have not touched
and fertilized her. In parts of Switzerland and France the lighting of
the Yule log is accompanied by a prayer that the women may bear
children, the she-goats bring forth kids, and the ewes drop lambs.[846]
The rule observed in some places that the bonfires should be kindled by
the person who was last married[847] seems to belong to the same class
of ideas, whether it be that such a person is supposed to receive from,
or to impart to, the fire a generative and fertilizing influence. The
common practice of lovers leaping over the fires hand in hand may very
well have originated in a notion that thereby their marriage would be
blessed with offspring; and the like motive would explain the custom
which obliges couples married within the year to dance to the light of
torches.[848] And the scenes of profligacy which appear to have marked
the midsummer celebration among the Esthonians,[849] as they once marked
the celebration of May Day among ourselves, may have sprung, not from
the mere license of holiday-makers, but from a crude notion that such
orgies were justified, if not required, by some mysterious bond which
linked the life of man to the courses of the heavens at this
turning-point of the year.

[The custom of carrying lighted torches about the country at the
festival may be explained as an attempt to diffuse the Sun's heat.]

At the festivals which we are considering the custom of kindling
bonfires is commonly associated with a custom of carrying lighted
torches about the fields, the orchards, the pastures, the flocks and the
herds; and we can hardly doubt that the two customs are only two
different ways of attaining the same object, namely, the benefits which
are believed to flow from the fire, whether it be stationary or
portable. Accordingly if we accept the solar theory of the bonfires, we
seem bound to apply it also to the torches; we must suppose that the
practice of marching or running with blazing torches about the country
is simply a means of diffusing far and wide the genial influence of the
sunshine, of which these flickerin